Fans bid farewell to original Wendy's

The original Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant, the foundation of the nation's No. 3 burger chain, closed for the final time last night, 37 years after the first spatula turned.

(By Barnet D. Wolf, the Columbus Dispatch, March 3, 2007)

The original Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant, the foundation of the nation's No. 3 burger chain, closed for the final time last night, 37 years after the first spatula turned.

The restaurant was the victim of a tired building, slow sales and declining customer traffic, a point reinforced by the comments of patrons who waited in long lines to order lunch.

"I haven't been here in a long time," said Bret Crow, who sat with fellow employees of the nearby Ohio Board of Regents offices.

This restaurant was the brainchild of a one-time fry cook whose ability to turn around a struggling Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in central Ohio made him a millionaire.

Wendy's, now based in Dublin, has grown to nearly 6,600 restaurants internationally.

The former cook, Dave Thomas, since became a part of American culture. Ironically, his celebrity wasn't from starting Wendy's but for acting as the chain's advertising pitchman from 1989 until his death in 2002.

Central Ohio customers flocked to the restaurant, at 257 E. Broad St., yesterday for one last burger and a few snapshots.

By 11:30 a.m., the line was out the door.

Bill Canonico didn't need valuable table space to savor a Frosty. The Whitehall resident made a special trip to see the restaurant one last time.

"This was the first place in Columbus I ever ate, in December 1974," Canonico said. "My buddy and I came here from Long Island to see if we wanted to move here."

"I'll miss it," said Bob Bedinger, who works two blocks away at National City Bank. "I travel a lot, but I've come here usually every week or two for more than 25 years. It's kind of sad to see this go."

* * *

"It's tough to get a meal downtown at the noon hour. We really ought to have a hamburger operation down here."

-- Len Immke, Dave's Way

In the late 1960s, Thomas regularly would exercise and take a steam at the Columbus Athletic Club with his friend, Len Immke, a Downtown Buick dealer.

They often discussed Thomas' dream of opening a hamburger restaurant.

"Hamburgers were always my favorite food, and I just felt that I understood them better than anybody," Thomas wrote in his 1991 book, Dave's Way.

Thomas was a Horatio Alger story even then. As an infant, he was adopted by a family in Michigan and learned the value of hard work as a busboy at a Fort Wayne, Ind., restaurant.

In the mid-1950s, he became a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisee, and in the early 1960s was asked to take over a struggling four-store KFC franchise in Columbus.

A few years later, Thomas sold his stake in the business, becoming a very wealthy man.

Immke, who died in 1991, was key to Thomas' dream, not only by serving as a sounding board but by providing a building for the new burger restaurant.

Immke bought a former restaurant building on Broad Street and was using part of it to prep new Buicks for his showroom across the street. The dealer gave Thomas the vacant former lounge and bar area to use.

Thomas took out a $14,000 loan to help open the place. It was approved by his friend, Everett Krueger, vice chairman of City National Bank, later known as Bank One.

"We all thought he was out of his mind," John Russell, the bank's former spokesman, said of Krueger.

* * *

"People were lined up from the minute we opened the doors the first day."

-- Gloria Soffe, a worker at the original Wendy's

As Thomas approached the opening of his restaurant, he sent flyers to many of the Downtown office buildings alerting workers.

"They said, 'Introducing the best burgers in town,' " recalled Lloyd Baker, who had begun working a few months earlier at 100 E. Broad in the local office of accounting firm Arthur Young.

The restaurant was called Wendy's, the nickname of Thomas' 8-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou. She is one of five children of Dave and Lorraine Thomas.

Thomas needed a portrait of Wendy to use for the restaurant's logo, so his wife sewed their daughter a blue-and-white-striped dress, styled and sprayed the girl's hair and put pipe cleaners into her pigtails to make them stick out.

Soffe remembers the restaurant's opening day as if it were yesterday. She watched it from behind the counter, as chili cook, cashier, bookkeeper and one of Wendy's dozen employees.

"It was amazing how many people came," said Soffe, who today works as a bookkeeper for another Thomas legacy, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.

"It was mostly word of mouth," she said of the restaurant that was a fraction of its size in recent years.

One of those watching the crowds from his office across the street was Jim Near, a Borden executive who had run the Burger Boy Food-O-Rama restaurants.

"I would look out my window and see the lines of people going in there all times of the day," Near confided to a reporter in 1994. "We kind of shook our heads in awe."

Near left Borden in 1974 to become a Wendy's franchisee and eventually became the company's chairman and CEO. He died in 1996.

His son, Dave, also became a successful franchisee, and he is now serving as Wendy's chief operations officer.

* * *

"It became a treasure hunt involving hundreds of people who have been part of Wendy's over the years."

-- Denny Lynch, in 1994

When Wendy's officials were thinking of ways to mark the company's 25th anniversary in 1994, they began with a plan to return an original table and four chairs to the first restaurant.

They ended up with a museum.

At the time, the chain was doing extremely well financially. The restaurant, known as "257" for its address, was still popular, sitting across from what was known at the time as the Center for Science and Industry, which brought a lot of kids each day to the store.

Memorabilia dot the walls: Pictures of Thomas with presidents and celebrities, a history of the chain's advertising and newspapers noting the company's historic events.

Wendy's original dress hangs in a glass-enclosed case.

But much has changed in the past decade.

Sales at 257 sagged after COSI moved away. Fewer people work in Downtown offices. There's little business after 5 p.m.

As the building aged, problems arose. There are also only a handful of parking spaces, and the unit never had a drive-through lane, which is almost a necessity these days.

Meanwhile, Wendy's parent company, Wendy's International Inc., found itself under pressure last year by impatient investors, who demanded the chain improve its results.

The company's numbers are up, but there is little wiggle room. Extra expenses, like a money-losing museum restaurant, had to go.

"It's very sad," said Lynch, one of Thomas' closest confidants. "We put off this day for years. We just couldn't put it off any longer."

Now, the original Wendy's follows the Downtown Lazarus and the Bank One name on central Ohio's business scrapheap.

All the memorabilia will be moved to the Dublin headquarters. The employees will be scattered to other restaurants. The company has not decided what to do with the building.

Still, some people hope the company might reopen 257 as a museum.

At least one customer expressed disappointment about the closing of the Columbus icon, especially one where she and her daughter dine frequently.

"I think they should do everything it takes to keep this place open, since it's the original," said Jessica Coulbourne of Hilliard, who was accompanied by her 4-year-old daughter, Kaiti. "Whenever we come here for lunch, it's crowded. Maybe they could just open from 11 to 2 or something."

Meanwhile, a group of Wendy's current and former employees joined some Thomas family members in a small reunion at the restaurant last night to reminisce about old times. There were lots of laughs and a few tears.

Then, quietly at 8:13 p.m., store general manager Hal Douglass turned the lock on the front door for the last time.

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